What is the added value of strategic theory in the understanding of Swedish securityand defence policies? By introducing a series of concepts that identify policiesthat are pursued in both peace and war such as escalation, deterrence, andweapons acquisition, we argue that strategic concepts contribute to the analysisof Swedish security policy mainly by highlighting forms of policy that do not conceptuallyrest upon the dichotomy of war and peace. Differently from mainstreamscholarly analysis that treats deterrence as one, uniform concept, we differentiatebetween four different logics of deterrence. Using this conceptual tool, we analyseSwedish policies in the 1950s and 2010s and discover that although Sweden pursueddeterrence during both this periods, her policies depend on a different logic. Bycomparison, 1950s Sweden understood to pursue deterrence understood as a wall,while 2010s Sweden understands the term in terms of a shield.

This book reflects on the way in which war and police/policing intersect in contemporary Western-led interventions in the global South. The volume combines empirically oriented work with ground-breaking theoretical insights and aims to collect, for the first time, thoughts on how war and policing converge, amalgamate, diffuse and dissolve in the context both of actual international intervention and in understandings thereof.

The book uses the caption WAR:POLICE to highlight the distinctiveness of this volume in presenting a variety of approaches that share a concern for the assemblage of war-police as a whole. The volume thus serves to bring together critical perspectives on liberal interventionism where the logics of war and police/policing blur and bleed into a complex assemblage of WAR:POLICE. Contributions to this volume offer an understanding of police as a technique of ordering and collectively take issue with accounts of the character of contemporary war that argue that war is simply reduced to policing. In contrast, the contributions show how – both historically and conceptually – the two are ‘always already’ connected. Contributions to this volume come from a variety of disciplines including international relations, war studies, geography, anthropology, and law but share a critical/poststructuralist approach to the study of international intervention, war and policing.

This volume will be useful to students and scholars who have an interest in social theories on intervention, war, security, and the making of international order.

The dismantling of rebel structures at the end of civil war is often considered to be one of the most important aspects of a successful transition to peace. Combatants are expected to lay down their weapons, but also to abandon their wartime networks. Yet, peace agreements and subsequent Disarmament Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) processes do not automatically, or necessarily, destroy rebel networks. In Liberia such structures have lingered since the war came to an end in 2003 and networks of ex-combatants are still active, though maintained and mobilised for new purposes.

The security political situation in Liberia, with weak formal security institutions and a history of predatory behaviour, has created an environment where informal initiatives for security and protection are called upon. In such an environment informal security groups have a natural platform. Based on original interview material and findings from fieldwork this thesis examines how post-war rebel networks are organised and operate in the informal security arena, while describing the rationale behind these lingering features of war. By doing so this thesis sheds light on how the adaptive capacity of former rebel soldiers is utilised by various Liberian actors, and the risks, but also possible positive outcomes, of such a development.

This dissertation follows individuals, former rebel commanders in particular, in post-war rebel networks from the time of war to 2013. We will see them, and ex-combatants around them, mobilised as ‘recycled’ warriors in times of regional wars and crisis, as vigilantes and informal security providers for economic and political purposes. Yet, we will also meet them when there are no specific event ex-combatants could be mobilised to fully examine the relevance of post-war rebel networks and ex-combatant identity in contemporary Liberia. In the conclusions basic underlying aims and purposes with the processes of demobilisation and reintegration are challenged. And as this thesis finds, one might even argue that these ex-combatants have succeeded in reintegrating themselves due to, not despite, the fact that they have not been demobilised.

The holding of multiparty elections has become the bellwether by which all democracies are judged, and the spread of such systems across Africa has been widely hailed as a sign of the continent’s progress towards stability and prosperity. But such elections bring their own challenges, particularly the often intense internecine violence that can follow disputed results. While the consequences of such violence can be profound, undermining the legitimacy of the democratic process and in some cases plunging countries into civil war or renewed dictatorship, little is known about the causes of this violence. By mapping, analyzing, and comparing instances of election violence in different localities across Africa, this collection of detailed case studies sheds light on the underlying dynamics and sub-national causes behind electoral conflicts. It reveals them to be the result of a complex interplay between democratization and the older, patronage-based system of “Big Man” politics and offers practical suggestions for preventing such violence through improved electoral monitoring, voter education, and international assistance.Appealing to policy makers and scholars across the social sciences and humanities interested in democratization, peace-keeping, and peace studies, Violence in African Elections provides important insights into why some communities prove more prone to electoral violence than others, and what can be done to help more democracies succeed.

Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the EU, the USA and the UN. It has made itself notorious for its violent radicalism and uncompromising rejection of the Jewish state. So after its victory in the 2006 elections the world was watching. How would Hamas govern? Could an Islamist group without any experience of power - and with an unwavering ideology - manage to deal with day-to-day realities on the ground? Bjorn Brenner investigates what happened after the elections and puts the spotlight on the people over whom Hamas rules, rather than on its ideas. Lodging with Palestinian families and experiencing their daily encounters with Hamas, he offers an intimate perspective of the group as seen through local eyes. The book is based on hard-to-secure interviews with a wide range of key political and security figures in the Hamas administration, as well as with military commanders and members of the feared Qassam Brigades. Brenner has also sought out those that Hamas identifies as local trouble makers: the extreme Salafi-Jihadis and members of the now more quiescent mainstream Fatah party led by Mahmoud Abbas. The book provides a new interpretation of one of the most powerful forces in the Israel-Palestine arena, arguing that the Gazan Islamists carry a potential to be much more flexible and pragmatic than anticipated - if they would think they stand to gain from it. Gaza under Hamas investigates the key challenges to Hamas's authority and reveals why and in what ways ideology comes second to power consolidation.

This study investigates how the Palestinian Islamists in Hamas came to govern following theirsuccess in the 2006 parliamentary elections. The study poses the overarching research question:How can Hamas's governance in the Gaza Strip between 2006 and 2012 be characterised andunderstood? Hamas has attracted particular research interest, partly due to its seeminglycontradictory nature and actions, and partly due to the fact that this was the first case of Islamistsin the Arab world to ascend to power by democratic means. On the one hand, Hamas has led anarmed struggle against Israel which has even included suicide bombings against the Israelicivilian population. On the other hand, Hamas has more recently shown both the will and theability to participate in electoral processes in a peaceful and democratic fashion.

As a result of this, the case of Hamas relates to two scholarly debates in particular. The firstdebate concerns the nature of Islamism - whether Islamist ideals can be considered fullycompatible with democracy. Ultimately, this debate has come to focus on what the democraticpotential of Islamists would mean in practice, should they get the chance to hold power. Thesecond debate concerns the nature of Hamas - how to comprehend the paradoxal conduct of thisactor and in what direction it is heading politically. There is also a strong extra-scientificrelevance to the study, as Hamas remains a powerful force in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. HowHamas is dealt with, both by Israel and the international community and by the Palestiniansthemselves, will have repercussions on when and in what shape the pending Palestinian state willmaterialise.

Based on existing scholarship on this subject, the aim of this study holds theoretical,methodological and empirical ambitions: Theoretically, the study seeks to contribute to the twodebates mentioned above. Methodologically, it seeks to contribute by suggesting a newframework for the analysis of Islamist governance. Empirically, it contributes by adding a newcase study to the existing research on Islamists in power.

The study addresses the research question by focusing on how the new government perceivedand reacted to three key challenges to its exercise of power: relating to the political system and themain opposition party; countering violent radicalisation and local splinter groups; and reestablishingsocietal order and reforming the legal system. The analysis is based on a recentlycollected set of primary data consisting of both observations and interviews. The respondentsinclude ministers, advisors and civil servants in the government, as well as military commanders,internal security personnel and members of the Qassam Brigades. They also include some of theHamas government's fiercest critics, notably Salafi-Jihadis, youth dissidents and members of theFatah party.

The study finds that the Hamas government lacked the necessary organisation, knowledge andexperience to carry out its duties. It also finds that the government perceived itself to be subjectedto an imminent threat of being overthrown. The study shows that while the Hamas governmentwas far from fulfilling the democratic promises it had set out in its reform programme, it did notproceed to change the political system into any sort of Islamic theocracy governed by sharia. Asthe analysis concludes, Hamas's governance could be characterised neither as singularlyauthoritarian and Islamic, nor as merely democratic and secular. Rather, Islamist governanceHamas style has been a blurred combination of all these traits together, firmly guided by a farreachingideological pragmatism and a continuously perceived necessity for further powerconsolidation.

The Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip first set out to crush the area’s Salafi jihadist groups by force. Once Hamas realized that the Salafi jihadi problem was more serious than it had first anticipated, however, Hamas’s approach shifted gradually, from a strategy of attempted elimination to one of containment and assimilation. Indeed, several of the pursued militants proved to be former colleagues from the Qassam Brigades who had grown disillusioned with Hamas and defected to fringe groups. This article examines how Hamas, as part of a new and progressive approach, aimed to rehabilitate these individuals by enrolling them in a prison-based deradicalization program that sought to appeal to a common ideological and religious base in Islam, treating Salafi jihadists as patients rather than as common criminals.

This article analyzes U.S. defense planning, and more specifically the public administration of the third offset strategy. The U.S. defense bureaucracy is rooted in a tradition of rational planning, which assumes a process of consistent, value-maximizing choices within specified constrains. The cornerstone in this tradition is the program budgeting system, once created to connect plans with budgets according to preferences. The third offset strategy, aimed at dealing with the challenges of geopolitical competition and budget austerity, is influenced by a different public administration philosophy described as metagovernance. Metagovernance is a challenge to rational planning as it entails an indirect approach of organizing arenas for networks, in which start-up companies and civilian corporations get to interact with government officials in order to identify incrementally suitable acquisition projects. Furthermore, the article contextualizes this tendency in reflexive modernity, in which rationality breaks down due to the pace of societal changes and planning processes constantly become subject to feedback.

This article suggests a diagnostic framework of public communication intended to capture new communication strategies used by Armed Forces across Europe to legitimize new tasks and recruit new personnel. Three distinct communicative models that impact differently on democratic values and public support are suggested: an Old Public Administration (OPA) model influenced by bureaucratic values, a New Public Management (NPM) model fuelled by market values and a deliberative model labelled ‘New Public Service’ (NPS) that is largely influenced by proponents of ‘e-democracy’. A case study of the communication of the Swedish Armed Forces identifies a lingering bureaucratic (OPA) ideal. The market ideal (NPM) however clearly dominates. The article concludes that communication along market purposes, principles and practices risks distancing Armed Forces further from society. Yet, an embryonic deliberative ideal (NPS)—much fuelled by the use of social media such as blogs—was also identified. This growing ideal holds the potential of infusing deliberative vigor into the organization and presumably facilitates the bridging of the gap to society.

This article investigates the Swedish decision to participate in Operation Unified Protector in Libya and the Finnish decision to refrain from the same operation. It takes as its theoretical point of departure the concept of strategic culture and argues that differences in the strategic culture of the two countries contributed to the differences in behavior toward the Libya intervention. The Finnish and Swedish strategic cultures differ with respect to the core tasks of the armed forces, willingness to use force, and with respect to what types of operations and organizational frameworks Finland and Sweden find it appropriate to participate in.

This article contributes to an explanation of why Poland, after a period of almost two years’ hesitation, decided to dispatch military forces to the United States-led coalition against the Islamic State in June 2016. The Polish case is examined by applying the concept of strategic culture, taking into account a state’s core military strategic beliefs and the historical experiences on which these beliefs are based. The case study shows that strategic culture shaped the Polish decision-making on the coalition, by predisposing the decision-makers toward a typical Polish behavior in international military operations, namely to exchange security benefits with important allies. The article also has implications for the general study of strategic culture, by specifying the relationship between historical experiences and strategic culture.

This article integrates literature on strategic culture with literature on the domestic politics of foreign policy, illustrating how the interaction of culture and domestic political calculation can influence government foreign policy on participation in international military operations. Empirically, the article investigates the decision made by the Government of Finland to refrain from participation in the military intervention in Libya in March–April 2011. The Finnish decision-making illustrates that domestic politics, in particular the factor of election timing, can strengthen the feeling among decision-makers that they should follow the country’s strategic culture. The article ends with theorization on the domestic political conditions under which decision-makers are more or less likely to deviate from strategic culture.

This article investigates why the governments of Australia and Poland decided to contribute military forces to the United States led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 when a majority of Australian and Polish citizens were opposed to national involvement in the invasion. The objective of the article is to increase understanding of the conditions under which governments ignore the public in their foreign policymaking. The article examines the explanatory power of four intervening variables: issue salience, elite debate, timing of the next election and the importance assigned to international gains by the government. On the basis of the Direct Method of Agreement, the article concludes that government perceptions of international gains and the timing of the next election were potentially necessary factors for the outcomes of the cases, while issue salience and elite debate were not necessary conditions. A distant election may, thus, provide sufficient electoral protection for a government that conducts a foreign policy to which the public is opposed.

This article investigates how strategic culture influenced the decision-making of Australia and Poland regarding the global coalition against the Islamic State. In the coalition, Australia has followed its tradition of active participation in United States-led operations, while Poland has embarked on a more cautious line, thereby breaking with its previous policy of active participation. The article examines how Australian and Polish responses to the coalition were shaped by five cultural elements: dominant threat perception, core task of the armed forces, strategic partners, experiences of participating in coalitions of the willing, and approach to the international legality of expeditionary operations. It finds that Australia and Poland differed on all five elements but that the major differences are found in dominant threat perception and core task of the armed forces.

After the EU Membership – New Strategies in Swedish Foreign Politics?After becoming a member of the EU in 1995 Sweden has been governed by theSocial Democrats (1995–2006) and by a Centre-Right coalition (2006–2014) led bythe Moderate Party. Has the EU-membership conserved the tradition of consensusamongst the political parties regarding the foreign policy or has it provided anew platform allowing the parties to express their different ideological preferencesalso in this field of politics? The aim of this article is to shed light on the foreignpolicy of the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party 1995–2014. By analyzing thedebates in the Swedish parliament, Riksdagen, it is concluded that the two partieshave similar strategies regarding the means and the ways of the foreign policy butdifferent approach regarding the views on the international settings and the endsof the policy. A potential explanation to the findings is the resurrection of Realismin the Moderate Party’s approach.

In this article, the Swedish parliamentary body responsible for conducting analysis on global developments and preparing the formulation of Swedish security and defence policy, försvarsberedningen (English: The Defence Committee), is explored. The aim of the article is to evaluate whether or not the functioning of the Committee in fulfilling these two tasks influences the political guidance of the Armed Forces in terms of strategy. The conclusion referring to the former task is that the Committee lacks a methodology and hence tends to have difficulties in predicting important events such as the Russian interventions in Georgia and Ukraine. The conclusion referring to the latter task is that the Committee has been successful in establishing a consensus amongst the political parties represented in the Swedish parliament, riksdagen. Even if this consensus has been weak, it has been broad enough to reach a parliamentary majority supporting the policy despite long periods of minority cabinets. Altogether, the performance of the Committee provides no support in directing the Armed Forces with strategies.

Hidden or Forgotten? – Realism in the Swedish Parliamentary DebateThe spoken word of politicians creates expectations for subsequent action. Thelanguage used when formulating security, foreign and defense policies can thusprovide an indication what measures the politicians are prepared to take in orderto promote their national interests. In international relations theory the use offorce is primarily associated with realism. The use of realist concepts in the politicalcommunication could thus serve as an indicator of the politicians’ views on the useof force. In this article the use of realism in the parliamentary debate in Sweden isexplored. The findings indicate differences between the political parties as well asbetween the topics of the debate.

Members of all political parties represented in the Swedish Parliament have during the past decades repeatedly stressed the necessity of directing military activities by using strategies. When focus in now shifting from participating in international military operations far from Sweden to addressing security challenges in Sweden's neighbourhood the needs for a new military strategy is obvious. The aim of this article is to explore whether potential shortcomings in the decisionsmaking process regarding the Swedish security and defence policy can explain why the Government does not seem to guide the Armed Forces with strategies.

This article revisits the twenty-three Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)-missions launched before the economic crisis hit the EU and its Member States to generate conclusions that could assist in the strategy process in Brussels. Six questions anchored in the field of Strategic Studies are operationalized in an analytical framework. Extant EU policies are utilized to identify plausible answers. The analysis suggests that the EU must close the gap between words and deeds to become a more credible actor. It would help the EU to operationalize its ambitions by exploiting its broad portfolio of policy options and to vanguard the post-modern society in crisis management.

Using primary sources from four Nordic countries, (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden), this volume explores how small states have adjusted their military strategies in response to external shocks of the 21st century. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Russian interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, and the rise of the Islamic State have all forced the Nordic states to adopt new strategies. While the responses have not been uniform, their differing relations to the EU and NATO have not prevented these countries from behaving similarly in military affairs. Limitations in military capacity has led all four countries to pursue strategies that include cooperation with more resourceful partners. It is necessary for them to cooperate with others to protect and promote their national interests. Moreover, the Nordic cosmopolitan outlook expresses milieu-shaping ambitions that we generally would not expect small states to pursue against a potential great power aggressor.

This book will be of much interest to students of military strategy, defense studies, security studies, and international relations.

This chapter explores the concept of military duty in the context of contemporary war. It focuses on the recent developments in the normative and strategic frameworks of Western military operations, which emphasize that mission effectiveness is largely dependent on the security and wellbeing of the local population. This has seemingly stretched the traditional notion of military duty, which is to master and apply organized military force to achieve political objectives and defeat the enemy on the battlefield. Based on empirical insights from the U.S. military and its recent missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the chapter argues that this development has created tensions between political and military understandings of duty, as well as between organizational and individual notions of duty within the U.S. military. Conflicting notions of military duty hold important policy implications to both domestic civil-military relations and U.S. military power abroad because they challenge the integrity of political objectives and threaten military cohesion and unity of effort with regard to the management of local populations during war.

This chapter studies how three successive German societies constructed the boundary between peace and war: The German Empire (1871-1918), Nazi German (1933-45), and the Federal Republic of Germany (1949 –present). In each case the ritual of taking an oath of allegiance was central act, both collective and individual, in making an individual into a warrior. Oaths of allegiance have been a standard instrument in creating individual warriors and groups of warriors since at least antiquity. They are powerful tools of governmentality since they are means of controlling the conscience of a subject and linking personal salvation to compliance. In the Imperial and the Nazi period, taking the oath was considered a binding deed that transformed the individual and commanded his loyalty.

Anarchy and hierarchy are two central concepts of international relations theory but as conventionally defined they cannot describe political life for most of Western history. Neither concept describes the structure of medieval politics well. Rather, many different principles of differentiation existed simultaneously, both stratificatory and segmentary. The situation was closer to anarchy as understood as the absence of overarching principles of order rather than as ‘anarchy’ in the conventional sense used in international relations and absence of government. The power of the Popes over temporal rulers was considerable, but it never corresponded to the concept ‘hierarchy’ as conventionally understood either. Between c. 700 and c. 1300, Europe became more heteronymous as time went by, not less. More principles of differentiation were developed, and both Popes and kings became more powerful. The reinvention of the papacy after the ‘Investiture Controversy’ (1075–1122) created a system of law and practices in which European monarchs and realms were embedded, but it did not create an all-powerful papacy.